Interview with Thomas Binns – Founder of The Guitar Social

Hey Sophia, it came from a bit of an experiment really, I was a musician in the North, I ran a studio and I was in loads of bands. I was permanently out gigging and I was so busy. I moved down to London and expected the same thing – I didn’t find it like that at all. I have a teaching and music background and I thought, if it’s difficult for me to meet musicians and I’ve played and studied for years, what must it be like for people who are just starting out and just stuck in their rooms on YouTube?

So in 2013 I just did one class as an experiment – I wondered what it would be like to get a group of people together and teach them all the guitar. That class sold out in a day after I listed it and then I did two classes a week, they sold out, then I did three classes, they sold out. There was this insane appetite for guitar classes!

I quit my job seven days later and then The Guitar Social was formed and it’s all I’ve done and thought about ever since!

Thank you. I think there has definitely been a rise in the number of people playing music for numerous reasons. YouTube is one of them. I think Ed Sheeran might have something to do with it as well. I used to get so many requests to play his music! But that’s only 50% of the equation.
The learning is one thing, but the

application is a whole other world and when I started The Guitar Social, there seemed to be no other competition. There was no one else that was offering classes, courses, workshops, local events or far away retreats, so I think I was very lucky to have had the right idea at the right time.

This is really interesting because of COVID, we are having to redirect what we’re doing, (more on this later), but essentially…It’s a place where you can

learn some guitar, put it into real world application, meet some people and just operate as a musician without any judgement whatsoever, regardless of what level you are.

I had 15 people in a small room in the Spread Eagle pub in Camden. For the first few weeks there were 15 of us and some of those people are still in touch today, attending jam sessions and events.
I started organising the social event side of the business back then and I

remember the first event we did, five people turned up and then the second one stands out as only one person turned up!

But obviously over time it changed and now if we do an event we get numbers of over 80 people at them.

Pre-March 2020, we would host Live Lounge events (The Guitar Social’s version of an open mic night), musical

quiz nights, park jams, Halloween parties, Christmas parties, musical tours of London, the list goes on.

We’ve got a mailing list with thousands of people on it and from that you might see some people every week, I’ve seen some people every week for six years now. The other day I was doing a class and saw a guy I hadn’t seen in three years, so people come and go as life evolves for them.
But on a good week I might have 150

people learning within a seven-day period and then with people attending events, you know I’d say about 200 people a month are using it, but that’s from a base of several thousand people.

Even though we have a big following, we keep our class sizes small so you get a chance to know your class mates.

It’s been absolutely insane! Because we’re called The Guitar Social and now the phrase that you hear a thousand times a day is social distancing, the word ‘social’ has ironically become anti-social!

In March we were about to open our first venue, a bar in Dalston, but that got put on hold. We’ve lost 50% of our income, we had a lot of holidays booked around the world with our retreats, we’ve lost those. It has been really challenging.

We are still doing classes and are even still hosting our Live Lounge events, but these are now done via Zoom.

I think that the silver lining is that when you are backed into a corner, you’re forced to really dig deep and diversify and I think at the end of this year, we’re gonna be looking at The Guitar Social being quite a diverse organisation in the sense that we will have to branch out and start thinking about a broader way we can enable people to learn guitar. The positive thing about doing online classes is that we’ve started welcoming people from across the country and beyond. We have learners from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, America and Europe, so we are starting to be able to reach more people.

Yeah, certainly, that’s basically the big focus for the next couple of months. I’m organising an event to try and raise some additional money, we had a partner who was donating £10,000 and now they’ve had to pull out, so I need to

raise £10,000. I’m going to host an event: a six-hour non-stop jam and we’re gonna do it with Crowdfunder (link to donate is below). Hopefully we’ll get the keys soon and start refurbishing and be in there by the end of autumn.

I set that up in 2013 to just say Merry Christmas to everyone and it’s existed ever since!
It’s a brilliant tool for keeping people connected and creating a community of

people who are passionate about music. It’s great for people to ask questions and discuss what they’re doing and share videos etc.

Oh wow, yeah, some great things have happened on there, for sure. It seems like the only thing we are missing is for a long lost brother and sister to find each other on one of our groups! That

would be cool! A lot of help has come from the groups, definitely. Musical discussions, advice, help and people have even given away some musical stuff on there.

I’d been teaching in a pub one Saturday last year (2019) for five hours straight and I jokingly said that it felt like I’d been teaching for 24 hours! I then wondered what it would be like to teach for 24 hours and whether I could actually do it.

I walked up to the bar and asked them if they would enable me to use a room in the pub to teach for 24 hours and they said yes, so the idea just came about as a bit of a fun exercise really.

I was then talking to our media sponsor (we are sponsored by an organisation called The Drum) and they thought it sounded like a great idea and put me in touch with the press department at

Guinness World Records, so a small idea turned into something big!

I’m pleased to say we achieved the world record in 24 hours and six minutes and we were able to raise £50,000!

With that money, we aim to give away free guitars (over 200, we hope), free tuition and courses to loads of vulnerable and disadvantaged people. I’ve taught blind and visually impaired people, we’ve worked with Shelter, Islington Refugee Centre, young people with complex health needs and the money raised will definitely help us to keep that part going. As soon as the COVID crisis eases, we’ll be getting back to this charitable work.

Yeah, definitely. The first thing I would say is “Anybody can learn to play the guitar.”

The hardest students to teach are the ones that say straight away, “I can’t do it.” When I hear that, the first thing I think of is a lady called Mary that I teach – she’s 98 years old and is partially sighted and she plays the guitar really well!

So I think what I would say to anybody is you absolutely can do it and you’d have to go quite a long way to convince me otherwise because I’ve seen that anybody can do it. You have to be less focused on ‘do I have

natural talent?’ and ‘do I have the right equipment’ and all of that. You’ve got to be very kind to yourself, and not be critical of your playing.

So anyone can learn guitar as long as you believe you can and that’s really what I’ve found… and obviously you’ve got to enjoy it! It’s an expansive, never ending tool of learning, there’s no bottom to the ocean!

The final thing I would say is you need to take it bit by bit, learn one chord, then two chords, then three chords. Step by step, enjoy it and try not to think about it too much!

Oh gosh, well, my musical hero I would have to say is my mother and she can only play three chords and I taught her them in the last two months! When I was growing up, my mum created a very enchanted, magical world of music for me. From a really young age she would sit with me and we’d put records on and she’d read the lyrics to me.

It was great having the lyrics to Neil Young songs read to me instead of nursery rhymes!
She made big sacrifices for me to go and

do guitar classes and she got me 15 years of private guitar tuition.
On the subject of my guitar heroes… I admire people who write songs and have a unique expression with the instrument. I love Van Morrison, Tom Waits, Neil Young, Bob Dylan. These are my favourite people and none of them are necessarily known for being guitar players, but they’re songwriters. Anyone who takes the guitar and writes a song is, in my opinion, more interesting than virtuoso and advanced players.